From my archive, a buffet of Purple Coneflowers being enjoyed by pipevine swallowtail, Battus philenor and monarch butterfly. Native wildflower gardens always bring the prettiest critters. 🥰
Thinking out loud. Do I move my tech/Apple oriented WP blog into it’s own micro.blog or just merge it with my current micro.blog which includes a mix of posts ranging from climate change to politics to nature photos? I guess I see the benefits of both, mixing and keeping separated.
After nearly a week of issues at my web host I’m leaning towards moving my remaining WordPress blog to micro.blog. I’ve always found WP too complicated and even more so these past few days. I’m just sorta done with the hassle that seems to come with it.
Some global perspective on income and climate:
The enormity of climate-change inequality has been laid bare by new research showing that the richest 1% of the world’s population produces 175 times as much CO2 per person as the bottom 10%.
The richest tenth of the world’s population produce half the CO2 emissions, while the poorest half generate just 10% of them.
You might read that and be inclined to ridicule that top 10%. But if you’re reading this chances are that you’re actually in the top 5%.
Richest 10% produce half the world’s CO2 emissions | The Independent
On Wednesday June 14, the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean reached an average temperature of 73 degrees Fahrenheit.
The average for this time of year, over the past three decades, is 71 degrees Fahrenheit. That two-degree difference reflects a gargantuan amount of extra energy stored in the ocean. The Atlantic has been riding a wave of extreme heat since last year.
“Scientists have been warning us about this for years. Everybody should be working on reducing fossil fuel emissions. That’s the critical thing: these fires are telling us something.”
My observation: People pretend to care on a superficial level but refuse to make any effort. If there isn’t a magic wand solution waved by someone in a government or corporate office, they don’t want to be bothered. No inconvenience will be tolerated or lifestyle change made.
Our beautiful planet will be a hellscape.
Exhausted crews battle Canadian wildfires as experts issue climate warning | The Guardian
Climate change is remapping where humans can exist on the planet. As optimum conditions shift away from the equator and toward the poles, more than 600 million people have already been stranded outside of a crucial environmental niche that scientists say best supports life.
In other words, 3 to 6 billion people, half of humanity, will be trapped outside of the liveable zone, facing extreme heat, starvation and death. This is to say nothing of the continued mass extinciton of other species.
Climate Crisis Has Stranded 600 Million Outside Most Livable Environment — ProPublica
Tens of millions of people in the US were under air quality alerts on Wednesday, as smoke from Canadian wildfires drifted south, turning the sky a murky brown and saturating the air with harmful pollution. Hundreds of fires are burning in Canada, from the western provinces to Nova Scotia and Quebec in the east
Canadian wildfires smoke engulfs north-east – in pictures | The Guardian
Highlight of the morning dog walk: a Kentucky warbler landed in a branch just above me. Chat, chat, chat, chat. It went on quite awhile and I was able to watch as it hopped from branch to branch. Such a beautiful bird!
Come fall and winter the Kentucky warbler will migrate back to the Yucatán Peninsula and the many islands of the Caribbean, flying non-stop across the Gulf of Mexico.
Also notable, a yellow breasted chat calling in the distance. My current favorite bird to listen to. Such an interesting song!
Spring has only just begun to transition to summer in the Northern Hemisphere, but some of the season’s most odious and dangerous extreme weather is already running rampant.
Prolonged and punishing heat waves in Asia have sent temperatures soaring to 100 degrees as far north as Siberia and above 110 degrees in Thailand and Vietnam, breaking records.
Wildfires are raging in Canada, which has never seen so much land burn so early in the year. They come after a record-warm May.
Extreme heat, wildfires wreaking havoc with hottest months still ahead - The Washington Post
I needed some images for a project and while searching photos from 2020 I came across these. Taken when I was able to get out on longer gravel rides on the back roads. Taken on an early morning ride when there was still a bit of fog in the low lying areas.
Trail photos!
Hydrastis canadensis, Goldenseal
Gymnosporangium juniperi-virginianae, the fungi that causes apple cedar rust. Such a strange and beautiful fungi!
Using Shortcuts on the iPad to convert an image or pdf, resize, save, rename and extract alt text, all with three taps
One of my regular tasks is updating the front page of our regional library website, either adding upcoming events or removing finished events. Shortcuts automates the process of converting, renaming, extracting text for alt tags and then saving the file for upload to the website. Then I can just paste the name of the file and alt text into my html file. Shortcuts for the win!
iPad Workflow- Using Shortcuts to process images for the web | Beardy Guy Musings
iPad Workflow- Using Shortcuts to process images for the web
Convert image or pdf, resize, save, rename and extract alt text with two taps
One of my regular tasks is updating the front page of our regional library website, either adding upcoming events or removing finished events. Our front page is a grid of event flyers with an expandable accordion under the flyer that contains a text description of the event, usually very similar to the flyer itself. A staff member emails the flyer with the accompanying text.
Previously my process was to have Mail and Textastic open side-by-side for easy copy/pasting. The attached flyer images are a mix of pdf, jpg or png. In the past I would have saved to Photos then selected them all and used a Shortcut to export to the website’s image folder in Files, converting them all to jpegs at a preset size and quality. Fairly quick and easy. I still had to rename the files and then I would proceed to copy the event text from the email and paste it into the html, manually copying or typing the name of image files into the html.
But in recent months I’ve added new steps to the shortcut. Now the shortcut will first process text in the clipboard, turning it into a variable, then it extracts the text of the flyer and adds it to the clipboard. Then the shortcut puts all the text together into a field which it copies to the clipboard. I’m not sure why I didn’t add these steps in earlier. This is the third revision of this shortcut, each time new steps have been added to streamline the process.
The only downside is that I can only do one image at a time which isn’t too bad as the typical email only has 2 to 4 such files. Overall I’m still saving far more time with this approach.
So, here’s how it flows from my perspective as a user: I select the text of an event in the email sent to me and copy it. Then I select the image or pdf in the message and select share then select the shortcut. The shortcut runs and brings Textastic to the forefront. I just scroll in my html document to where the new event text/photo is to be inserted then paste. Done! I still have to spend a minute there adding a couple of paragraph tags and a quick clean-up any errors in the text extraction but it works pretty well and the whole process only takes a few seconds after I paste.
So, while the original process was 6-8 minute back and forth between Mail and Textastic with bits of text editing, copy/pasting in Textastic, the new process is a text selection and copy, 2 trackpad taps in Mail then a paste. About 20 seconds.
Shortcuts is a fantastic timesaver for repetitive tasks and it’s an app I keep finding new ways to use.
Carl Sagan testified to Congress in 1985 about the danger of global warming and advocated for a transition away from fossil fuels. A beautiful new video animates wildlife automata using his warning of climate disasters: “Carl Sagan’s Message.”
“We’re doing something immensely stupid…The abundance of greenhouse gases is increasing. One degree of temperature change is enough to produce widespread suffering and famine worldwide.” Unfortunately in 2023, the planet has already surpassed one degree, and we now face the immense task of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celcius.
Source: Colossal
El Niño is the warm phase of the Pacific Ocean’s temperature cycle, and this year’s El Niño is poised to be a big one, sending shock waves into weather patterns around the world.
“A warming El Niño is expected to develop in the coming months and this will combine with human-induced climate change to push global temperatures into uncharted territory,” said Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization.
I don’t often speculate about upcoming Apple announcements but I’m going to make an exception with this post. And it’s nothing complicated, just putting a few pieces together. Most of it is probably pretty obvious to folks who have been paying attention Apple news over recent months. Before I continue, for anyone not familiar with my blog, I’m a full-time, very satisfied iPad Pro user. I’m not someone who struggles with the iPad, not someone who longs for macOS on the iPad. For me, iPadOS sings and my interest is in seeing what Apple does to…
An iPad Pro Revival
I don’t often speculate about upcoming Apple announcements but I’m going to make an exception with this post. And it’s nothing complicated, just putting a few pieces together. Most of it is probably pretty obvious to folks who have been paying attention Apple news over recent months. Before I continue, for anyone not familiar with my blog, I’m a full-time, very satisfied iPad Pro user. I’m not someone who struggles with the iPad, not someone who longs for macOS on the iPad. For me, iPadOS sings and my interest is in seeing what Apple does to refine the iPad experience rather than any hope of a macOS to iPad face-plant, er, transplant.
May 29, 2023. We’re a week past the release of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for the iPad. Apple first announced the release on May 9th and it took everyone by surprise. It’s always fun when they can still surprise everyone! Boom. And, interesting that such a significant announcement is done by a press release a month before WWDC. For the most part the reviews have been very positive. The two most repeated critiques of FCP for iPad: No round tripping to and from the Mac and no editing off of external hard drives. But given this is the initial release, it seems reasonable to expect that these two features will be added before long.
We’re one week away from WWDC 2023. The rumors of a VR/AR headset have been buzzing for the past year. In recent months it’s been rumored that the headset would be running many of Apple’s apps in an iPad-like form. Many assume the headset is now a certainty that will be announced at WWDC 2023.
While much of the excitement about WWDC 2023 has centered on speculation about the headset, it’s OS and features, I’m curious about the connection that might exist between the headset and the iPad or, more specifically, the potential commonality between the two operating systems. Given the rumor that the headset will, essentially, be running iPad apps, this seems a relevant question to consider. Given the need for energy efficiency, it would make sense that the OS running the headset would be more like iOS or iPadOS than macOS. If true, well, then there is now a new category of hardware that runs on the iOS family.
Another rumor, discussed far less, is a larger iPad Pro, perhaps 15 or 16". With the release of FCP and Logic Pro for iPad, a larger iPad Pro would make a lot of sense. And of course with these new pro apps, it also starts to seem inevitable that Xcode for the iPad will be released. We’ve seen some big improvements to Swift Playgrounds in the past couple years but still no Xcode.
Last year we saw quite a few improvements to iPadOS and the stock iPad apps. Much of this was overshadowed by a few prominent pundits that disliked the implementation of Stage Manager. I’m not going to dwell on that other than to say that the negativity around the feature is greatly overblown. Though not what some wanted, many of us use it and actually like it. It’s certainly made my iPad experience much better, allowing me to use 3-4 apps at once. It’s been a real and measurable productivity boost for the work I do. At the very least, it is Apple’s first step towards an improved multitasking experience on the iPad.
But looking at the improvements brought to iPadOS over the past 2 to 3 years, we have an OS that is has steadily matured. The Files app has had many previously missing features added and is now fully functional, nearly on par with the Mac Finder. Stock apps like Notes, Mail, Safari, Reminders have all seen significant improvements.
Putting the puzzle pieces together If the rumors are true it would seem that Apple has also been developing the headset and its OS for awhile. For several years they’ve been publicly promoting Augmented Reality and LiDAR with new hardware and software features on the iPhone and iPad. Tim Cook has been outspoken of his support of AR during that time.
In a week Apple will begin to provide more details about where this journey is going and how they expect these devices to work together. Given previous years development of the larger Apple ecosystem, it seems likely that not much has been left to chance. Apple has a well thought out plan that it’s been following. It would seem a given that the time and energy put into the development of LiDAR and AR in iOS and iPadOS has been a part of the process of developing the OS and hardware for the headset.
Of particular interest to me: how will the features and technology put into the headset OS overlap or come back to iPadOS?
My expectations and hopes for the iPad in 2023 and 2024 is that Apple will continue to fill out and refine the OS and the default apps. I think most of this list is just an obvious continuation of what we’ve already seen.
What I’m hoping or expecting to see in terms of iPadOS and apps:
- Files: More customizable tool bar, more complete indexing of file contents for better search results, more column options in list view
- Improved or added support for smart lists, saved searches in apps like Files, Mail, Notes, Reminders, Contacts
- Improved Safari bringing it ever closer to the full desktop experience
- Improvements for Stage Manager and multitasking
- Improvements to virtual memory and background tasks for apps like Final Cut Pro
- While Pages, Numbers and Keynote are all excellent apps, there's more to do to bring them fully in-line with the Mac apps
- As the new app in the Apple ecosystem, Freeform could use some big improvements. This app should really shine on the iPad.
- FCP: To start I'd expect to have the above mentioned missing features addressed: round tripping to and from the Mac, editing from external storage
- Xcode. I'd guess that in 2023 Swift Playgrounds will again be improved but that we'll also see Xcode for iPad. First to what will be described as Xcode lite and then to something closer to the full version.
- Improved Lock Screen that will bring last year's iPhone Lock Screen improvements to the iPad
- Improved widgets, perhaps with new options for interaction
An iPad Pro 15 or 16". Along with this I’d hope/expect to see other iPad accessories as Apple broadens the iPad platform. A new version of the Magic Keyboard. The iPad Pro needs better battery life, I’m hoping we’ll see this in the form of a new Magic Keyboard with an integrated battery that can charge the iPad. I imagine the Brydge form factor but with more ports. I can imagine this combination being the iPad Studio. Larger iPad, FaceTime camera moved to the long side, M3, detachable Magic Keyboard that boosts the iPad to 20 hours of battery life. I’d expect it to have the same battery life as a MacBook Pro but weighing in a bit more as it would be 2 batteries. Also, maybe a redesigned Magic Keyboard for the current line of 13" iPad Pro and a new M3 13" iPad Pro.
In short I expect that Apple will double down on its commitment to the iPad platform: hardware, iPadOS, Pro apps and accessories.
Last, a few words on the larger Apple Ecosystem and the new headset as the new TV
- iCloud Pro?
- More sharing, collaboration and development of the iCloud and app ecosystem into a more complete social network.
- Whatever is happening with the headset I'd expect Apple to market it as the new TV. Talking to family members that all have iPhones, I've recently become more aware of their media consumption habits. It's more individualistic than I realized. It occurs to me that the long-term vision of the headset might simply be the new TV: Movies, shows, sports and as a general purpose computer. I'd speculate that Apple hopes that in 5 years homes with iPhone users will have 1 or more headsets that have replaced flatscreen tvs.
As the world warms, extremely hot days are becoming more frequent and intense, reaching unprecedented temperatures associated with excess mortality.
All selected locations may see 1–2 additional months with excess thermal deaths by 2100, which stresses the need for effective adaptation planning.
The length of a human life is around 80 years. You might get 100 if you’re lucky. The universe is about 13.7 billion years old. The vast difference between a human lifespan and the age of the universe can be difficult to grasp — even the words we use in attempting to describe it (like “vast”) are comically insufficient.
To help us visualize what a difference of eight orders of magnitude might look like, Wylie Overstreet and Alex Gorosh have created a scale model of time in the Mojave Desert, from the Big Bang to the present day.